Unfortunately I don’t get to do reviews here, I just can’t afford the toys. The people at PCMag aren’t as unfortunate. They have got their hands on the damn powerful VGN-SZ791N, and they really liked it. They gave it a hefty 4.5 out of 5 circles. It even earned the Editor’s Choice branding. Unfortunately, even the best can’t run Crysis, with a lousy frame-rate of 6 at 1024×768.
For the compete review, click over to PCMag.
The new Acer Gemstones designed notebooks have been around a while, and truth be told, they aren’t that attractive. That will change soon with the upcoming Aspire 6920 and 8920G.
Both notebooks run a Penryn based CPU, with the standard array of memory and HDD options (the 8920 can hold 2 HDD’s). The nice additions are the Blu-Ray drives, NVidia GeForce 9650M GS and the unusual screen sizes. The 6920 comes with a 16-incher while the 8920G comes with a super weird 18.4-inch screen. Both screens are also capable of 1920×1080.
The real seller for me is the look. From the product shots they look a million dollars, but really range from $US900-1700 (I don’t believe that is possible). Lets hope Acer sticks to this design, and move around from corporate ugly (the standard for a lot of companies).
F0r more info then you will ever need, click over to Akihabara News.
It is a mix of processor and LED backlighting, but with both features you are getting between 30mins to a hour. That is taken directly from Apple though, so a grain of salt is needed. 5 hours, in my book, is still not nearly enough.
For more info, click over to Gizmodo.
It has been rumoured for a while, but only moments ago is it official. There are new Macbooks and Macbook Pro’s on the Apple block, and they got some handy, but not life changing updates. The biggest one is the introduction of the Air’s Multi-Touch pad to the whole Macbook range and the updated processors to Intels flagship Penryn series.
They’re also getting a much more powerful graphics processor, with the introduction of the sweet new Nvidia 8600GT with 512mb of memory onboard, on all the new Pro’s. The new top end processor is the beastly 2.6 GHz processor with 6MB of shared L2 cache.
The rest of the package is pretty standard affair, but is nice to see Apple rolling out the Multi-Touch feature to its minions. Starting from $US1,099, the new Macbooks are available from the Apple website immediately.
For a whole lot more info, click over to Apple Insider.
If you aren’t familiar with Penryn, don’t worry neither am I. I had a quick look up on good ol’ Wikipedia, and they said it is basically an upgrade from the Merom of old (basically the T5000 and T7000 series of mobile processor’s). So if you haven’t worked it out, this is pretty big business for Intel. The Merom’s are freaking awesome (poor AMD never had a chance) and will be dearly missed (though they will probably be seen in notebooks for months/years to come).
You can’t pick one up in a store quite yet, but soon you will see offering from HP, Sony, Fujitsu, Acer and surely many more (Asus will release info any second now). From HP you will see the 6820s (17-incher with a Core 2 Duo T8100 CPU at 2.1GHz or T8300 at 2.4GHz), Sony will have their FZ31, SZ71, CR31 and AR61, Fujitsu will have Amilo Xi 2550 and 2428 and Acer will have an array of five with the 2920, 4920, 5920, 7720 and 9920.
The new processors will use less power and run cooler, meaning thinner quieter notebooks with longer battery lifes. When the benchmarks start coming in it will be interesting to see if the new Intels can create as much of a storm as the old. I will try and keep you up to date as more companies announce more notebooks.
For more info, click over to the Gizmodo and Laptoping Websites.